


the fate of a guilded heart

by rosesburnedalive



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: 'and I'd die for you if you asked me to', Angst, Fluff, but like the kind of angst that's like 'I love you too much and I dont want to hurt you or lose you', death mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-11-02 12:13:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20742257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosesburnedalive/pseuds/rosesburnedalive
Summary: What happens before a god weeps, before the violence of blooming blood, before Apollo throws the stone?A prince falls in love with a god. A god falls in love with a mortal. A story about the dichotomy of beauty and tragedy, birth and death, and the terribleness of fate.———The hour before Apollo throws the discus





	the fate of a guilded heart

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this initially for my penpal who challenged me to write something relating to/a rewrite of/inspired by greek mythology and I ended up liking it enough to post here...
> 
> if you don't know the myth of Hyacinthus and Apollo or just want a refresher I recommend Madeline Miller's [article](http://madelinemiller.com/myth-of-the-week-hyacinthus/) or OverlySarcasticProduction's [brief video](https://youtu.be/MxEWO7Uc7D0). this is a telling of Hyacinthus and Apollo's relationship before all that happened.
> 
> also, I really wanted to make it sweet but, alas, there is angst sprinkled in here. I am who I am.

“Beauty dies: that is the source  
of creation.”  
_— Louise Glück_

“After screaming, [Cassandra] calls out the name of Apollo six times, then again a seventh time, but the seventh time, by shifting the inflexion of the name slightly, she shows its etymology. Apollo’s name is cognate with the Greek verb apollesthai, ‘to destroy utterly, kill, slay, demolish, lay waste.’ By crying out ‘Apollon emos’, Cassandra can designate the god as ‘my Apollo’ and ‘my destroyer’ at the same time in the same words.”  
_— Anne Carson, Cassandra Float Can_

“...For Love is blind and cruel, and the end  
Of every joy is sorrow and distress.  
And when immortal creatures lightly bend  
To kiss the lips of simple loveliness,  
Swords are unsheathed in silence, and clouds rise,  
Some God is jealous of the mute caress ...”  
_— Olive Eleanor Custance_

  
—

Hyacinthus was warned at a young age that the gods are nothing but trouble, that they’re dangerous, because of course they are. It’s common knowledge that the gods tend to meddle. Their fingerprints are smudged across existence — every mountaintop, every riverbed, every divot of skin, the taste of figs, the shine of gold, the sickly sweet smell of rotted flesh — all of it, touched by the gods.

They break things and steal things and maim things and sometimes, they do things of unattainable beauty. To look is to see their crafts, to hear is to listen to their voices, to touch is to feel their presence. _ We are their voyeurs _ Father had told Hyacinthus. _ More so than they are to us _.

But the gods are fickle things, most days. So of course Apollo is late. Really, Hyacinthus should have expected this, when has Apollo ever been on time?

Hycinthus shivers as the west wind tousles his hair. 

The wind doesn’t feel friendly today. It keeps asking him what he’s doing, and he keeps not having an answer. The sun bears down on him and the grass brushes against his feet and the tree against his back digs into his skin. Everything seems to be holding in a breath and preparing for something. 

His life is measured by this pathetic waiting, by the times between Everything. Apollo breaks those moments in half.

Hyacinthus doesn’t want to be chained to this. To continually wait for the reprieve Apollo brings and the feeling of sun soaked fingers tracing senseless shapes onto the skin on the inside of his wrist. A touch that says ‘_ you are alive and I am alive and for some reason we are alive at the same time and I’ll touch you as many times as needed to remind you of that. _’

Apollo would be here soon. Maybe.

Hyacinthus closes his eyes and digs the heels of his palms into his eyes. 

He is important by association. Apollo’s fascination with him seems to be out of boredom. How could a god love someone like him? His value to the rest of the gods is minimal at best and even their curiosity lies solely in the fact that they can’t see anything quite special enough to entrap the attention of Apollo.

Hyacinthus peels a piece of bark off the tree behind him and turns it over in his hands. It reminds him of rotted flesh. Was this one a woman too?

Even his political worth relies on the circumstances of his birth never to leave the mouths of those who know he’s not his parents’ child.

It’s all very dramatic. 

“Boo!”

Hyacinthus startles, dropping the bark and spinning around to face Apollo. 

“Apollo.”

“At your service.” Apollo bows, looking pleased with himself. 

“You scared me, you pig,” Hyacinthus’ voice doesn’t sound as peeved as he wants it to, so he smacks the god over the head. “And, you’re late.”

Apollo, seemingly unperturbed, tosses his discus to the ground and flops down onto his back, stretching out on the grass. The shadowless light makes him look immortal, for all the world like someone who will not fall into something as feeble as worry. 

“I am not late, you are merely early.” 

“One day you’ll scare me so badly that I’ll punch you,” Hyacinthus muses,putting his hands on his knees and leaning over the god. Looking down at Apollo is like staring at the sun’s reflection. The whole of him is too big to see all at once, so Hyacinthus has to cut him up into pieces. The feeling of Apollo’s hand in his hair. Apollo’s fingers wrapped around his ankle when the weather turns cool. His satchel on his shoulder. Bruises made by him and vice versa. Gilded eyes and honeycomb hair — khrysopos and intangible. That was part of Apollo’s lure, this quality of being not quite there; like if you were to reach out to touch him your hand would pass through the mist of him. 

“What a bad idea,” Apollo says, lips tilting in that familiar way that Hyacinthus likes so much, “to punch a god.”

“It would be worth it just to see the look on your ugly face.”

“Oh yeah?” Apollo grabs Hyacinthus by the wrist and yanks him down, making Hyacinthus yelp in surprise, and rolls the two of them until he is sitting on Hyacinthus’ hips and pinning his wrists next to his head. “Alright, fearless prince of Sparta, what’s your next move?” Apollo asks with a smirk.

A flash of teeth and a wicked grin is the only warning Hyacinthus gives to Apollo before twisting to the right and biting the god’s wrist and using Apollo’s surprise to roll them again until they switch positions. Apollo underneath, Hyacinthus on his hips, pinning his wrists next to his head. 

“Gotcha, golden-boy.”

Apollo’s laugh below him shakes the world. 

“That was cheating!”

“No it was not! You’re the one that pulled me down, hypocrite.”

The dichotomy of Hyacinthus’ brown skin against Apollo’s golden is startling. Apollo’s laugh dims and their eyes meet, shocking with rotten chaos, this contagion of madness. This aching hunger. 

Apollo’s face cracks open into a grin or grimace. It’s hard to tell. 

A feeling of something bound to happen overcomes Hyacinthus. As if this moment in particular is important, that this would change them — how he doesn’t know. So he lets go of Apollo’s wrists and lays down next to him because that is all he can do. Close enough to feel the heat of him but not close enough to touch. 

Hyacinthus, curling into himself, whispers the name of the god into a question, scared of what the answer might be.

“I am a plague.” the god answer, his voice soft on the wind. “Everything I touch, everything I love, turns to verdure and pyre. I care too much for you to end like that.You should never love a god, Hyacinthus, it will only end in tragedy.”

This, Hyacinthus is aware of. Whenever Hyacinthus is with Apollo, talking under the laurel tree at the edge of a cliff or bantering over their latest adventures, or wherever it may be, Hyacinthus saw — beyond his own descent into longing — the occasional glimpses of the fall of hundreds of others whose names he shall never know, and he would become distinctly aware that there is a great, unrecorded history of Apollo lost to the whims of mortality and the Fates. This repeated image of a lover destroyed.

Apollo’s love is a violent act — not against the person he loves, but against the world. To Apollo, ‘I love you’ meant ‘I love you; by extension, I hate all other things’. So of course there were consequences.

“I’m afraid that you are far too late for me to heed your warning,” Hyacinthus confesses, turning to look at at Apollo, but his words don’t seem to reach the god.

“You are not continuous, Hyacinthus; you will die one day and I will be left alone without you and it will be my fault.”

This Apollo, timid and fallible, looks far more like the young boy he was when Hyacinthus first met him than a god. 

That day in the field of greens-and-golds when Hyacinthus had asked _ Who are you, _ and Apollo answered _ I am the plague and the one that heals it. I am the lyre, the one that wields the sun. _ The way the sun had reflected off his skin it seemed as if he didn’t only wield it but that some of it dripped onto him, stained him gold. _ Who are _ you _ ? _ Apollo had asked backed, standing there with gold and jewelled sandals on his feet, radiant and divine. And Hyacinthus could think of nothing more to say than _ No one special. _

Apollo had laughed and that was the first time flowers grew between Hyacinthus’ ribs. 

His father had never warned him about beautiful boys or immortals wrapped in aurum. The hunger that contains them. The honey-wine on lips, the crook of a nose broken too many times, the path of a wiry scar running down the back of a leg. What, Hyacinthus had wondered, could scar a god?

_ The fault of passion, _ Father had said. _ Everything wrong with the world stems from passion. It hungers for everything but would rather have nothing at all than only a fragment. It is a dangerous thing. _Perhaps Father was wrong. Hyacinthus would bleed for only a piece of Apollo.

“When I die,” Hyacinthus whispers. “I want to die by your hand so that even in death I will be loved.”

“If you die I will renounce everything I am so I may join you.”

Hyacinthus has no idea how to react to such a tragically beautiful thing, so he brings his lover’s hand into his own. He had long ago memorized the shape of Apollo’s hands: the paths of prominent veins; the large palm and large knuckles that punctuate his long fingers; the way his pinky curves in slightly, delicately. 

Apollo’s palm look delicate — even cradled on top of Hyacinthus’ smaller ones — and Hyacinthus wants to treat it accordingly, despite the overwhelming urge to run a blade across it, to slit it deep enough to bleed. To slit his own as well. So that if they were to press their palms together everything that flows through Apollo would flow through him and everything that flows through him would flow through Apollo. Blood and ichor, a body joined by circulation.

An ouroboros made out of flesh. 

Instead, he cradles Apollo’s hand in his and charts the lifeline with his fingertip for the same affect. The pulse of Apollo’s veins merely millimeters beneath battle worn skin entrances him. Maybe Apollo would let him pull one out and tie it around his wrist and, _ gods _, what would that mean?

“Hyacinthus.”

Hyacinthus doesn’t want to answer that plea. Not now. Not yet. So he brings Apollo’s palm to his lips, kissing where he’d run the knife, ignoring Apollo and the weight of his eyes on him — eyes that have an untamed wildness to them, a careless power carried through them like a wolf’s. Hyacinthus can not bear it, he doesn’t have the courage to meet Apollo’s burning gaze, so he pretends that he is dreaming and lets his eyelashes flutter shut to nuzzle his face into Apollos’ palm.

Apollo’s expression is serious when Hyacinthus finally opens his eyes but he likes how it softens slightly. Apollo’s voice is dim when he finally speaks. 

“We will end in tragedy.”

“I know.”

“Then why aren’t you leaving?”

_ Because there is a sun inside of you and it hurts to look at, _ he thinks _ . Because there is a sun inside of you and it rages, rages, rages — gold and scorching — and you could set the world on fire if you wanted and I would burn with it if you asked me to. _

“Because I can’t,” Hyacinthus says, bringing Apollo’s hand away from his face and intertwining it with his own. “I’ve given myself to you in a way that shocks me; there is something inside us that binds us and I do not wish to severe it.”

Their clasped hands — half god, half man — lay between them.

Apollo looks at him, as he had been looking at him for years. Hyacinthus looks back, as he had been looking back for just as long. With the presence of Apollo so near him the world becomes softly blurred, and it feels as if he would melt right into it. Apollo licks his thumb from his free hand and swipes it across Hyacinthus’ cheekbone. Flames at his fingertips, a touch that burns. That’s where the gods reside, Hyacinthus decides; where flesh meets flesh. And they are _ alive _, so alive.

“What was that for?” Hyacinthus asks, breathless as Apollo’s hand rests across his cheek. 

“You had some dirt.” As if that answers anything.

The west wind blows across them and Apollo removes his hand, taking whatever that had bloomed between them with it and Hyacinthus can’t tell if he was grateful for that.

“What are we doing today? Where is your lyre?” 

“Did you get knocked in the head?” Apollo says, emphasizing his point by tapping on Hyacinthus’ forehead, “I told you yesterday!”

“I wasn’t really focusing on what you were saying.”

“Well, I found this place just past those trees and down the hill a bit that is perfect for quoite.”

“And your lyre?”

“I’ll play for you tomorrow if that is what you would like and we can drink wine and eat teganites with honey and figs.”

“Sounds luxurious.”

Apollo stands up and surveys the trees, leaving Hyacinthus’ hand empty and gaping. Only half of a whole. In that moment Hyancinthus feels finite and small. Perhaps — like those before him, those that turned to laurel and jumped into the sea and saw tragedies that no one else could — he would perish because a god decided he was interesting enough to care about.

“Only the best for us.”

Apollo grabs his discus from where he tossed it earlier.

It would be nice for Hyainthus’ fate to be left undestined and open for him to find his own possibilities. To be given a chance to choose. To see himself through the eyes of a god. His god, his destroyer. But Hyacinthus keeps his eyes on the trees before him.

_ We are their voyeurs. _

“Come on, anthos.” 

At that, Hyacinthus does look up. Apollo’s eyes are trained on the clouds and he — this creature, inexhaustibly wild and ferociously alluring, wearing the skin of man — stands tall and godly and powerful in all his tragedy and all his beauty; but perhaps there is little difference between tragedy and beauty when you are a god. 

Would Atropos still cut Hycinthus’ thread short even when he loves the god? Would Apollo crown himself with something from Hyacinthus like he had done with his other lovers?

Apollo turns to him then and his gilded eyes meet Hyacinthus’ — gilded eyes, gilded heart, gilded string of fate — and spins the discus in his hands. It seems natural for it to be there, flesh — cracked and calloused from pulling up the sun — against stone. He holds one out for Hyacinthus.

“Let’s go shatter the clouds,” Apollo says, voice dripping with honey, “and chase the ones that fall.”

**Author's Note:**

> me, shaking: it's about the *clenches fist* tenderness
> 
> Hyacinthus is my second favourite character in greek mythology, second only to Dionysus, so I hope I did him justice. I was going to do an info dump about him here but it got kind of long so I left it in the comments if you want to check it out. It’s an extremely pared down version which is scary.
> 
> come yell about myths and literature with me here:  
[main tumblr](https://rosesburnedalive.tumblr.com)  
[art tumblr](https://owlpip.tumblr.com)


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